Some scientists find inspiration in the lab. Others trek into the field. Laurie Santos likes the local coffee house.The 36-year-old runs Yale University’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory, which examines the origins of the human mind by studying primate cognition. Many of her experiments try to determine the roots of human economic behavior.

The primate lab is home to 10 “shockingly smart” brown Capuchin monkeys trained to trade tokens for food. It was a short leap for Dr. Santos and her team to decide to study how monkeys make decisions about money. In setting up a monkey market economy, they knew they had to gather the kind of data that would “convince an economist,'” said Dr. Santos, so she enlisted the help of Keith Chen, an associate professor of economics at Yale School of Management. They usually met at the coffee shop to swap ideas. Once the effort got under way, students in the lab started dropping in, too. They all liked the central location, informal setting and “having an excuse to get coffee,” she said. In deference to her students’ late-night habits, most meetings were held in the afternoon.